Burkhard Tönshoff

Burkhard Tönshoff, MD, PhD, is a professor of pediatrics and pediatric nephrology at the University Children’s Hospital in Heidelberg, Germany. He is the vice chairman of the Department of Pediatrics I and the medical director of the pediatric kidney transplantation program. His current research focuses on various aspects of kidney transplantation including studies of the pharmacokinetics, efficacy and safety of novel immunosuppressive drugs in pediatric kidney transplant recipients, the optimization of immunosuppressive therapy through therapeutic drug monitoring and immunomonitoring, the prevention of infectious and other complications after kidney transplantation, the minimization of immunosuppressive therapy guided by biomarkers, the impact of donor-specific HLA and non-HLA antibodies on graft histology and function, and the role of the gut microbiome in immunosuppressive drug metabolism and transplant outcome. In 2009, Dr. Tönshoff founded the multicenter research network and platform, the Cooperative European Paediatric Renal Transplant Initiative (CERTAIN; www.certain-registry.eu), which is based on a novel, web registry. CERTAIN is the official transplant registry of the European Society for Paediatric Nephrology (ESPN).

Awards and nominations: He is a member of the Eurotransplant Kidney Advisory Committee and the Scientific Steering Committee of the Transplant Cohort of the German Center for Infectious Diseases. He is the chairman of the Kidney Transplant Working Group of the European Society for Paediatric Nephrology (ESPN) and of the German Society for Paediatric Nephrology (GPN). He is a council member of the International Pediatric Transplant Association (IPTA) and served as president from 2015 to 2017. Since 2018, he has been the editor-in-chief of the journal “Pediatric Transplantation”, the official journal of the IPTA. In 2023, he received the IPTA Lifetime Achievement Award.